Viaggi magnetici e spiritici nel XVIII e XIX secolo. Francia-America andata e ritorno

The theory and therapeutic application of animal magnetism proposed by Franz Antoine Mesmer (1734-1815), in spite of the unfavourable outcome of the royal medical commissions set up in 1784, which decreed its unfoundedness, successfully imposed itself in social practices and in artistic and literary production at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The theatricality and suggestive potential of Mesmerism's approach, combined with its openness to the imagination so intimately linked to the creative dimension, strongly inspired European literature and theatre, and then, though opposed, migrated to the United States. From the cynical deployment of slavery on American plantations to performances in the main theatres of the East Coast and on the boats, via the first American novels by Poe, Melville, Stowe and Hawthorne, the magnetism becomes American. Such is its adherence to American culture and the history of ideas that one of its nineteenth-century developments, spiritualism, moved from America to later conquer the European imagination: a new migration to the old continent, which once again became enchanted by seances, spinning tables and mysterious communications, a cultural migration which is once again a source of prolific inspiration for all the arts.